Tag Archive: Fantastic Four movie

With 20th Century Fox’s own Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse previews released this weekend at San Diego Comic-Con, the studio will be hard-pressed to gin up significant support for its efforts to reboot the Fantastic Four brand with next month’s release of the third film to feature the classic Marvel team. But the studio at least has put the final trailer for the movie into the fans of the masses with this release, after giving an early look to panel attendees at Comic-Con.

The new team of “kids” as the preview calls them also will be up against the buzz generated this weekend for other 2015 and 2016 films, including superhero flicks Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad.

Some trailers instantly reel-in moviegoers, even if they are the shorter “teaser” versions of movie previews. One you won’t find on the list of best trailers or teasers is the first released for the reboot of super-team Fantastic Four in The Fantastic Four, just released. Like the not-so-amazing and unnecessary reboot of the Spider-man movie franchise, here again Marvel Studios is re-launching another one of their classic superhero titles. As moviegoers, and fans of the superhero genre in particular, why are we supposed to care about this new version?

Clearly this next film is another origin story. Yawn. We already saw the origin story of the team in the 2005 Fantastic Four movie starring the superb British actor Ioan Gruffudd as a perfect Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, with Michael Chiklis as comic-book-character-come-to-life Ben Grimm/The Thing, Jessica Alba as a great Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, and Chris Evans as a brilliant Johnny Storm/Human Torch. In fact the Human Torch and The Thing should be on everyone’s top list of comic book characters realized on the big screen. So why do it all over again ten years later?

If you’re going to take hundreds of millions of dollars to do something again, to please fans you need to make the new entry exponentially better. Not just a little better, and not just with bigger effects, or a younger cast. Otherwise fans of the series aren’t going to play along, or if they do, it is with full knowledge the studio is only squeezing as much revenue out of the franchise as they can regardless of whether there is anything redeeming about the new version. This isn’t to say the new movie might be good, a lot of fun, or even great. But it’s the studio’s job to sell us on it. That’s what trailers are for. They’re like book covers. This teaser gives us nothing to get excited about. It might as well be the trailer for Hulk or Iron Man 2.